At BLOX Digital, we believe success starts with finding the right people. The work we do here is changing the local media industry, and these are the people who are making it happen. Today we shine a light on Michael Smith, Backend Data Engineer.
What is your background?
I'm originally from a small town about an hour to the east of the Quad Cities. I grew up out in the country and loved drawing, comic books, animals, music, sports and eventually computers.
When our school first got internet in the mid-90's, I immediately took an interest in computers, web development, and programming. After graduating with a degree in computer science, I began working in the Quad Cities at a computer training company as an instructor. I taught classes in Microsoft Office, PHP, MySQL, ASP, and certification programs like CompTIA. After a few years, I realized that I wanted to work in a full-time position doing web development.
From there, I worked in a number of roles at companies doing everything from web development to IT administration. Eventually, I found my home here at BLOX Digital in 2020. Since being here, I've worked on many projects like our Weather API and CRM platform, and most recently, I became part of the data onboarding team.
What do you love most about your job?
The culture and the people were instantly something that drew me in here. At a lot of other companies I've worked for, I've always felt out of place, but here I feel welcomed, appreciated, and like I'm part of a family.
Specifically with my team, I've had the opportunity to grow, offer my expertise as well as learn from others and grow significantly. I truly value the bonds I've formed here with my team members and look forward to what we can do in the future.
What are you currently working on that you'd like everyone to know more about?
On our team, we typically deal with data and the direction it's heading. One of the more challenging things we do is handling a partner's data for ingestion into our system. This is no easy feat in a lot of cases because the quality and format of this data varies greatly from import to import. But our team is very dedicated towards building tools to make this process easier.
Most recently, we've been working closely with our solutions support team to build and implement tools used in a variety of workflow processes, specifically a "send-to-print" workflow.
What are you most excited about for the future of the news industry?
I'm most excited to see what we can contribute technologically towards advancing the news industry in the digital age. I'm excited to see what products we can build that make journalists' lives easier and facilitate an uncomplicated process for disseminating news to the masses.
What's something people don't know about you?
I love spending time with my family: wife Kelly, daughters Abbie (8) and Alex (5). If I'm not spending time with them, I'm tinkering around with tech, playing video games or guitar. We have two cats (Lucy, Eleanor) and two guinea pigs (Cocoa, Bingo). Fun fact about me: I started playing Sudoku a few years ago and am now in the top 5% of all players for speed solving puzzles.